Saint Ursula and Companions

The cult of Saint Ursula goes back to Cologne, Germany, where an ancient inscription from around the fourth or fifth century records that a man named Clematius rebuilt a basilica on the site where holy virgins had been martyred. Over the following centuries a famous legend grew around them.

According to the legend, Ursula was a Christian princess from Britain who, promised in marriage to a pagan prince, set out with many companions on a pilgrimage to Rome. On their return they were massacred by the Huns at Cologne for refusing to renounce their faith. The number of companions became fixed in the legend as eleven thousand, possibly from a misreading of an old abbreviation. Little can be known with certainty about their history, and the feast was removed from the General Roman Calendar in 1969, but they remain in the Roman Martyrology on October 21.

The Basilica of Saint Ursula in Cologne, with its walls decorated with bones, keeps her memory alive. In 1535 Saint Angela Merici placed her new company of women teachers under Ursula's protection: the Ursulines, who still run schools around the world.

On his second voyage in 1493, Christopher Columbus named a group of islands in the Caribbean after Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins: today's Virgin Islands.